One-Year Anniversary Blog Spectacular!

If I can steal my own words from an online conversation I had recently with Robert J. Baumann (and maybe even verbatim because that makes things very easy), I will say that my general feeling is that most of the time writing about baseball on the internet is just the worst, but occasionally it’s the best and that makes it all worth it. I’m this dude who decided one day, when he was the incredibly stupid age of 18, that he was a writer, and now here I am, a 26-year-old asshole, not even all that smarter, and what the fuck does that even mean. I guess it means that in the meantime I read some shit and I wrote some shit and for the most part, I had fun and my brain liked it. Then I didn’t write for a long time and then I started up again because in order to call yourself a writer (only in the secret recesses of your alcohol-soaked brain, and to your parents and wife—never in public or to acquaintances or to strangers) you have to, you know, actually write words and ask people to read them. That’s how it works even if it’s horrible. And it’s not like I’m good at anything else. Well, that’s not true, I’m pretty good at managing a DVR.

I’ll keep going because inertia is a powerful thing, and because every once and a while, I craft a post or a paragraph or a sentence or a string of three words in a row that makes me feel good inside and fulfilled and I forget for a fleeting moment that one day me and everyone I know is going to die. That sounds depressing but it’s not supposed to.

The value comes from the trying. Trying is something I don’t like to do or make people aware that I’m doing, but the trying is where the energy comes from. It’s what’s made me, I hope, a little less irritable in this second stage of my twenties, what’s allowed me to embrace a modicum of acceptance as to the way things are.

So thank you for reading. Thank you for interacting with me on the internet, and for being funny and interesting and brilliant. If you’re my wife (and only one of you are), thank you for putting up with my terrible attitude on the evenings when there is no inspiration and a post is due in the morning, and thank you for pushing me to write even when I don’t want to (always).